In food retail shops and sushi-go-round restaurants, dedicated cooked rice molding apparatus are used as devices which mass produce rice balls for hand-rolled sushi. For example, as described in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-197823, a cooked rice molding apparatus is provided with a compression section which delivers cooked rice supplied from a hopper while compressing the cooked rice and a forming section which forms the cooked rice delivered from the compression section into prescribed formed cooked rice products.
The forming section has a pair of forming rollers which rotate in directions opposite to each other around a prescribed horizontal rotary axis, feeds sushi rice from the upstream side to between the forming rollers and compressing the cooked rice with concave molding surfaces formed on outer surfaces of the forming rollers, whereby cylindrical rice balls are released from the downstream side and fall onto a table.
In small-scale shops, rice balls which have fallen onto the table are recovered by the worker. However, in a case where a large number of rice balls are continued to be produced for a long time, a dedicated food arrangement device which recovers the rice balls from the table and arranges the rice balls on trays is often built in the cooked rice molding apparatus.
For example, as described in Japanese Patent No. 3741836, this food arrangement device is of a type which is connected to a food molding apparatus in a crosswise adjacent position (a connected type). This food arrangement device grasps up the rice balls discharged from the food molding apparatus by use of an arm, causes the rice balls to move to a tray via X-Y axis moving means, and then places the rice balls on the tray by lowering the arm. According to this device, it is possible to arrange the formed rice balls in order onto the tray by causing the rice balls to be grasped by the arm.
In addition to this type, there is also a type in which a food molding apparatus and a food arrangement device are integrated together (an integrated type). In this type, rice balls are adapted to fall immediately from a forming section onto an X-Y moving stage provided in the lower part of the forming section, and the tray is moved in the X-Y direction each time a rice ball falls, whereby it is possible to spread the rice balls over the tray.
However, the above-described conventional examples had problems as described below. That is, in the case of the connected type, the installation space is separately provided for the food molding apparatus and the food arrangement device and it is necessary to have a large work space for the two units. Furthermore, because of the provision of the two units, a mechanism for synchronizing the operations of the two units becomes complex, resulting in high cost.
Furthermore, because of alternate actions due to the connection of the two units, during the delivery of formed products from the food molding apparatus to the food arrangement device, position shifts and catch mistakes are apt to occur during the gasping by the arm, and it was not rarely that the arm broke formed products due to catch mistakes.
In the case of the integrated type, it is necessary to move the tray seat provided on the lower side in the X-Y direction and, therefore, a space which is at least double the size of a conveyance tray in length and breadth becomes necessary. For this reason, the machine dimensions increase.
In a case where formed products are pushed out of a food molding apparatus onto a tray by use of a pushing-out rod and the like, the formed products may sometimes fall under their own weight before the retraction of the pushing-out rod and lose their shapes. Furthermore, this case has the problems that the pushing-out position shifts and that formed products roll on the tray.
Hence, the present invention has been made to solve the above-described problems and the object of the invention is to provide a food molding apparatus which can perform all steps from forming to conveyance and storage in one housing and which is small in size and inexpensive.